Ethics watchdog groups in Washington on Thursday called on House Speaker Paul D. Ryan to impose a moratorium on privately sponsored travel abroad for members of Congress, following reports that a group of nonprofits lied about the true source of funding for potentially hundreds of lawmaker and Congressional staff trips to Turkey.

“These trips have become a tool for special interests, foreign governments, and foreign business interests to try to gain access and influence to our elected leaders while obfuscating the source of funding for the trips,” the letter reads.

The groups, including Public Citizen, the Campaign Legal Center, Common Cause and the Project on Government Oversight, note that while lawmaker travel can serve an educational function, the practice has come to resemble the “Jack Abramoff travel junket era” in terms of sheer volume. The number of privately-sponsored trips, cut by two-thirds after an ethics overhaul in 2007, has risen again to nearly match the days when the disgraced lobbyist took lawmakers on lavish golfing trips abroad, according to the letter.

In August 2014, the Houston Chronicle reported that the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic, or SOCAR, and other energy interests had sponsored a convention the previous year in Baku, Azerbaijan attended by 10 members of Congress from around the country. The U.S.-based nonprofit groups that organized the conference did not disclose to the House Ethics Committee who had sponsored the convention, an apparent violation of ethics rules.

The Office of Congressional Ethics, a quasi-independent watchdog for the House of Representatives, and the Ethics Committee, made up of Democratic and Republican lawmakers, both investigated the trips.

The Ethics Committee received OCE’s final report last summer but did not release it to the public when it ended its own review and absolved the 10 Azerbaijan travelers of wrongdoing. The panel reported that it had provided documents to the Justice Department for further investigation into third parties outside of its jurisdiction.

Then last month, OCE released the report the Ethics Committee wanted kept out of sight. It raised new questions about the sponsorship of potentially hundreds of lawmakers’ and staffers’ trips to Turkey – including a trip by current Ethics Committee Chairman Charlie Dent in 2011, as OpenSecrets Blog reported recently. The blog has also revealed that Dent received contributions from individuals linked to the groups that claimed to have paid for the 2013 Baku trip, and that several of the lawmakers who were on the trip later introduced legislation that would benefit the true sponsor of the travel, the state oil company of Azerbaijan.

And it isn’t just travel to Turkey and Azerbaijan under scrutiny. OpenSecrets Blog reported last month on travel to several countries over seven years by House Agriculture Committee Chairman Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.), paid for by a group that received significant financial support from a poultry company. In their letter on Thursday, the watchdog groups cited reports by ProPublica and a recent USA Today report on the Turkey trips as evidence for a need to review the practice.

​ Meredith McGehee, policy director at the Campaign Legal Center, said a policy solution would be to allow a limited number of certified groups to sponsor educational, nonpartisan conferences. She said the current system is “ripe for abuse, especially obfuscating who the real source of funding is.”

“Just imagine the difference between a trip to ANWR [the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] in Alaska put together by the Sierra Club versus a trip put together by an oil company seeking to drill there,” she said.

Will joined the Center in May 2015 as the money-in-politics reporter for OpenSecrets.org. Previously, he spent two years as an investigative reporter for Hearst Newspapers in the company's Washington, D.C. bureau, investigating members of Congress for the Houston Chronicle, the San Antonio Express-News and other Hearst newspapers. He graduated in 2013 from the University of Alabama with a degree in international relations and was the editor-in-chief of The Crimson White, UA's student newspaper.

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